Originally Posted by
tehealadin
They are not being surrogate parents. It is a point of contact to share information/concerns. They do not take any parenting decisions.
The parents do get to decide how to raise the child. Control is not taken away.
I am not lying or misrepresenting things. You are misrepresenting things by repeatedly claiming that the named person, who in the case of secondary aged children will be a guidance teacher in a secondary school, will be involved in raising the children, they won't be.
Give me examples of how they will be raising the child?
And before you go and bring up the idea of them speaking to the child behind the parents back, this already happens. I have given sexual health advice to young folks without their parents knowledge or consent. I have given them career advice without their knowledge and consent. I don't need it. It isn't about them.
I don't think you understand how child abuse, especially the worst kind of child abuse works. Post postmortems into child abuse cases usually always find several things- the perp (usually the parent/guardian) goes to great lengths to hide what is happening and mislead professionals involved in the child's life. They also reveal that different people pick up on different things, that on their own might not mean much, but taken together paint a very clear picture. They also show that many people don't know what to do when they see something happening. Who to contact? The police? What if it is nothing? that seems a bit over the top. This goes for people in other professional services. And all too often, concern about being intrusive towards the parent takes precedence. The fundamental shift here is that concerns about what the parents think will not be at the heart of decision making- it will be the child's welfare.
You then end by listing examples of things that are not abuse and would be of no concern to the named person, or anyone else involved in child protection. Know what people are looking out for?
1- Are they getting their asses kicked?
2- Are they being sexually molested?
3- Are they being neglected?
4- Are they coming to school starving and stinking?
5- Are they involved in drugs?
6- Are they involved in crime?
7- Are they being exploited?
And if the answer to any of this is "yes" then the parent would be involved. They would have to be. For many of these things, they would be involved to make things better, and for some, they would be involved because the police would be involved and action would need to be taken against the parents. When a child is being abused, it becomes everyone's problem. Children's services get blamed when a parent ends up killing their child. Questions like "what could we have done?" get asked. Even if it isn't fatal abuse, my tax money then needs to go paying them housing benefit, paying court costs and then the cost of keeping them in jail, because odds are, kids growing up in a hell hole tend to turn out worryingly like their parents. Not all- but too many, and it ends up costing all of us. All because of shitty parenting and nothing was done to try and intervene and make things better. And it is also worth noting, they don't just rush in and say "we are taking your kid!", this is a last resort, the fundamental attitude here is that the kid is better at home, they can only be removed if there is pressing evidence that this will result in serious harm/death. A lot of the time, interventions will be based on helping the parents cope, finding ways to change behaviour in the household and make it less abusive, more loving.
Now, I am not claiming that as things stand, the implementation is perfect- it clearly isn't, and people involved on the ground have worries about how it will work in practice. However your attack on the core premise of this is just flawed, and ignorant. The overwhelming majority of organisations involved with children support the idea behind it, if not the way it is to be implemented.